What makes a spin a Spin?

[Josh Boyer]

Board Members,

While doing spins is a new thing to all of us, rel-eng is curious as to
exactly what qualifications the Board uses to determine if a spin is
worth being officially branded and pushed to rel-eng to host on
spins.fedoraproject.org.

Currently, we have a total of 14 spins that have been proposed to
rel-eng as of late.  Of these 14, two have been handled so far.  Those
being the XFCE spin, and the Hindi localized spin.  The remaining 12
spins are all localized spins.

Doing some back of the hand calculations, the remaining 12 spins will
take roughly 8GiB of space for i686 only.  If one were to extrapolate
this to the absurd, doing an i686 spin for every language currently found on
http://translate.fedoraproject.org would take 50GiB of storage space.
The machine hosting the spins only has 84GiB of disk space available
for now.  While that overall size may not sound significant, the fact that
all of those spins only differ by very small changes from ISO to ISO is
quite alarming.  

The above counts only for disk, which is admittedly cheap.  The
remaining factors going into generating a spin aren't as easily
measurable.  Particularly when we're still trying to figure out the
whole process, from submission to test to final hosting.

While it's not my intention to belittle the work that has gone on for
these spins, I do question whether this is the goal the Board had in
mind for spins.  In my personal opinion, not speaking for rel-eng or
anyone else (since that often seems to get mistaken on this list),
officially hosted spins should be reserved for "big ticket" items.
XFCE, KDE, FEL, Games are all good examples of those.  Things where the
package content actually differs to a larger degree from the base
Fedora spin.

Officially approving localized spins is perfectly acceptable to me,
however hosting them and pushing them through the rel-eng process
(still being defined) seems largely to be overkill.  I think we should
reserve that for "Featured Spins", and allow creation and hosting of
smaller spins to be done elsewhere.

And now that I've said spins entirely too many times in one email
(20!), I think I'll try to get un-dizzy.

josh